Friday, September 09, 2011

WTC & Brooklyn Bridge, East River (and a thought about bravery)

This is actually related to the prior posts in an odd way. Remember how I said it had been a long, long time since I'd been on a Circle Line? Well, I'd taken this photo on that very trip. I can't remember if this was when we were in town for my cousin's wedding (the fateful event during which I got my first job in NYC), or when my family first visited me after my dad retired & they were on their way back to Hawaii and having a nice leisurely trip across the country visiting everybody they could think of on the way. Whichever it was, we did the "half-circle", because that gets the highlights. This was one of those.

Got to do the full circle many times, under my own steam. Boy, I should look and see if there are any fall dates that I could run one for the club. Been ages.

Note a bit later: I just wanted to share something I posted on my Facebook wall - because I've just been so sad here in the leadup and it felt good to add a little "proud" to that. There's been this thing going around about the NYPD and NYFD not being invited to the ceremony this year. I'm feeling a little too overwhelmed by all the...stuff...this year to take sides, but I just had to address a phrase about them running in while "everybody else was running out". It wasn't quite that simple. We were actually better than that that day.

People were leaving, but one of the magnificent things about that terrible day was that there were THOUSANDS of individual acts of courage, small and large, performed by people from every walk of life. We will never know the true measure of the collective bravery that happened that day.

We were all leaving, yes. But we were slowing down, stopping, even sometimes going back to help others where we saw things that we could do.